Factory enables steel company to flex its muscles

Mike Sullivan (front) with general manager Wayne Carson and works manager Jim Denham, says the factory will allow D&H Steel to expand. Photo / Steven McNicholl

A West Auckland engineering business is opening a new steel fabrication factory next week.

The 12,500sq m factory has been built for D&H Steel Construction which is building supports for the new Kopu bridge on its welding beam manufacturing line.

Clearwater Construction, a sister company of the Henderson firm, built the factory.

Inside, D&H will build components to be trucked to the site of the $47 million upgrade of the one-lane gateway to the Coromandel Peninsula. A two-lane steel bridge will eventually cross the Waihou River south of Thames.

The bridge is expected to be ready to carry motorists to and from the peninsula by Easter, 2012.

Work on the 60 bridge units is just one of a number of jobs at D&H and Mike Sullivan, managing director, said the new factory would enable the firm to expand.

Finance Minister Bill English is due to open the plant at 42 Brick St off Swanson Rd next Wednesday.

Sullivan said work on the bridge supports would begin this month. Each beam would be 1.6m deep by up to 32m long.

The new factory represented the culmination of 35 years' work in the steel industry, he said.

"It brings together the latest technology in welded beam manufacture, steel processing, fabrication and painting," Sullivan said.

All the functions will now be carried out under one roof.

D&H, which has 100 staff, has worked on big warehouses, high-rise buildings and malls.

Big jobs D&H has worked on include Auckland International Airport's pier extension and arrivals hall, Westfield Albany, a Mainfreight terminal in South Auckland, redevelopment of Westfield's Lower Hutt mall, the Queens Lodge apartments in Newmarket and Sylvia Park Shopping Centre in Mt Wellington.